The Private Sector Efforts

Related to the topic of last week's class, I found two interesting articles online related to the involvement of the private sector in the effort to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.

1. Article on Barclays Bank's efforts (link)
2. Article on Sprint and Motorola's involvement (link)

The first article discussed Barclays Bank's launch of a new program in Africa, in which they provide confidential testing to their employees and anti-retroviral therapy to their employees and family members. Barclays Bank operate throughout Africa, including Botswana, where a confidential HIV/AIDS testing revealed that a third of the staff were infected. Due to the negative impact of HIV/AIDS on profit through factors, like absenteeism, high cost of emergency care, and loss of productivity (discussed by Barnett and Whiteside in Ch.10), executives of Barclays Bank decided that the returns from its investments to fight HIV/AIDS within its corporate structure outweigh the cost of running the program and the decrease in profits caused by the epidemic.

The second article talks about Sprint and Motorola's new partnership in fight against HIV/AIDS in africa by selling a special Valentine's Day model of the RAZR phone. The sales of this model so far is said to be enough to provide ARV treatments for 12,000 HIV/AIDS patients in Africa for a year. Sprint and Motorola are part of a larger private sector initiative, named RED, which is also supported by other corporations, such as Gap, Giorgio Armani, and Apple. Corporations involved in RED can sell RED products, and a percentage of their profits from such sales go to the Global Fund.

While the first article gives the perspective of a company that already has operations in Africa directly, the second article gives the picture of how corporations in the developed countries can participate in the fight against HIV/AIDS as a third-party. Barclays Bank's launch of their project is based on the fact that they directly receive direct impact from the spread of HIV/AIDS because they operate business in Africa. Their decision to make investment is based on the fact that such investments make financial and business sense, which means their efforts have a potential to be long-term. However, the second article is about corporations using the fight against HIV/AIDS as a PR tool and a chance to prove to their customers and investors that they have a socially responsible conscience. The project launched by Sprint and Motorola is very short-term (it's a Valentine's Day special). I can't help but to think about how much of a difference can projects of this scale actually make? In the consumers' mind, how much of an impact will this initiative leave? Some consumers may purchase the RED wireless phone because the proceeds go toward a good cause. However, many will buy the phone simply for the design and forget about the cause behind it. As a company already directly involved in Africa, Barclays Bank can initiate projects that can result in improvements in health of those who are infected. However, so many institutions in the private sector of developed countries have no operational ties in Africa--since they have no business in Africa, they can only launch anti- HIV/AIDS efforts as a third party.